Kamala Harris: The Anti-Fashion Plate
Why her custom Chloé pantsuits actually make so much sense.
Dear readers,
This is the last issue of Back Row I’ll send before I go on vacation next week. I’ll be back in your inboxes after Labor Day, in time for New York Fashion Week.
Speaking of NYC: if you are in town on September 4, please come say hi at Rizzoli bookstore, where I’ll be doing a talk with author Nancy MacDonnell about her brilliant new book, Empresses of Seventh Avenue. We’ll also have signed copies of my book, ANNA: The Biography. The event is free to attend, but we’d love it if you’d RSVP.
Wishing you all a wonderful rest of summer!
xo
Amy
In today’s issue:
How designers approach creating custom clothes for Vice President Harris as she campaigns for President.
Why her buzzy custom Chloé pantsuits are a logical choice.
Loose Threads, including that new Vogue Hulu series, and more.
Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic party’s nomination for president Thursday night wearing a custom navy blue suit with matching silk pussybow blouse by Chloé, led by Creative Director Chemena Kamali. The color choice distinguished her from Hillary Clinton, who accepted the nomination wearing Suffragist white (also seen on many attendees in the arena), while nodding to her party’s color. The monochromatic look also stood out for Harris, who has been wearing pantsuits with a contrasting top. While it was fashionable by virtue of originating from Kamali’s buzzy atelier, it didn’t distract from Harris’s words or history-making nomination, as the first Black and Indian American woman to run at the top of the ticket.
Harris has cast herself as someone who understands the struggles of average voters, having worked on their behalf as a prosecutor and come from a middle-class background. She tries to strike the balance of looking polished and presidential without coming across as elitist and fashionable. How can she do that while wearing these custom European suits? In the context of presidential clothes that came before her and what’s available to her in the market, her choices make a lot of sense.
If Harris becomes our first woman president, her style will be fascinating to observe. Her clothes are pretty much guaranteed to result in endless media analysis and partisan meltdowns, the same way the tan suit Barack Obama wore for a 2014 press conference, to discuss how the U.S. military would respond to ISIS, led to Republicans calling him “unpresidential.” (There were also plenty of “yes we tan” and “the audacity of taupe” jokes.)
That suit stood out as a departure for Obama, who had told Vanity Fair’s Michael Lewis in 2012 that he alternated between only dark blue and dark gray suits, quite often made by American brands Brooks Brothers or Hart Schaffner Marx, though he also wore the Italian label Brioni. Lewis wrote:
You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” [Obama] said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.”
The tan suit was also a departure in the recent history of presidential fashion. Presidents like Ronald Reagan used to wear a greater variety of clothing. But dark suits, as menswear writer Derek Guy recently noted, have become de rigueur.
Getting dressed as a politician is much more straightforward for men than women. Men basically wear suits — they don’t need the “pant” descriptor as that is the only style of suit they would wear — and flat shoes. If they’re hosting a state dinner, they wear a tuxedo and flat shoes (if they’re short, they’ll wear stacked heels or a platform they attempt to disguise as plain and flat). If they’re speaking at a campaign rally for regular folks, they’ll lose the tie and/or jacket and roll up their sleeves. Their prints are limited to, what — checked shirts? Maybe plaid ones? Occasional pinstripes?
Harris, if elected, would set precedent for women presidents. The range of acceptable clothing options for her are much more vast. Dresses, skirtsuits, or pantsuits? Flat shoes, heeled shoes, or boots? Flared leg, tapered leg, or cropped leg? Tuxedo jacket, boyfriend jacket, or belted jacket? Button-down blouse, fine-knit turtleneck, or pussybow blouse? And that’s not even accounting for colors or prints.
Harris has been sticking to pants, like Hillary Clinton has since 1999, when she stopped wearing skirt suits after an up-skirt photo of her from a press event ended up on a billboard in Brazil. Clinton favored a conservative, slightly tapered leg with a sharp crease. Harris’s preferred silhouette lately has been a loose-ish leg with a slight but noticeable flair, a pointy stiletto pump that’s not too high, and a contrasting shirt, which prevents her from looking trendily monochromatic. She seems to favor a pussybow-style blouse, often with the tie draped in the front, or a crew neck paired with a necklace (often pearls). For more casual daytime appearances, she wears Converse sneakers. This week, she posted a video of her calling Tim Walz to wish him luck on his Wednesday night speech. She wore a blazer and dark pants with flat loafers that looked to be Gucci, as though she had kicked her heels off at the end of an event.
For her appearance on the first night of the DNC, Harris wore a tan suit by Chloé, which went viral on Twitter because the brand calls the color “coconut brown” on its site. The suit was another custom design by Kamali (Chloé previously made Harris a custom cape gown in deep green silk for a May State Dinner for Kenya’s president and first lady). Over the course of her Vice Presidency, Harris has favored custom pantsuits in vivid colors by American designers including Sergio Hudson and Prabal Gurung. She he has also worn Joseph Altuzarra, Christian Siriano, and Tom Ford, trendy brands that diverge from what I’d call an “apple pie” label like Ralph Lauren, which first couples tend to favor.
Sergio Hudson started dressing Harris when she became Joe Biden’s running mate in 2020. He told the Hollywood Reporter that her team always provides him with clear instructions. “The emphasis was about ensuring she is taken seriously as an elected official; she never wants to be perceived as a fashion plate,” he said. “The first couple of years, the suits I did for her were only black, only navy, only gray. Now I feel like she’s a little more comfortable, so we’re designing suits in colors. I know Prabal [Gurung] did a tan suit, while I’ve done a pink suit and recently one in a brightly colored turquoise.” Harris has reportedly worked with stylists Karla Welch and Leslie Fremar, who dressed her for Rolling Stone, but agents for both have declined to comment on it. I would be surprised if we see her cover Vogue again, not because her February 2021 cover was so poorly received, but because it would be so at odds with her effort to not be a fashion plate. (Since it is traditionally the First Spouse who does the Vogue press, I hope Vogue offers Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff a glamorous editorial.)
Employing a stylist and wearing custom designer suits by European labels isn’t the stuff of regular folk. These are arguably not risk-free moves. But just as Obama was able to figure out a system for looking nice every day that didn’t distract from his job, so must Harris.
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